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I must admit to being a bit gobsmacked by this:
September 14th, 2010 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Over the weekend, Tim Evans, who has been a friend of mine for about a quarter of a century, and who is now part of the Cobden Centre ruling junta (listen to a recent and relevant interview with Tim Evans about that by going here), has been ringing me and emailing me about this, which is a so-called Ten Minute Bill (I think that’s what they call it) which Douglas Carswell MP and Steve Baker MP will be presenting to the House of Commons this Wednesday, just after Prime Minister’s Question Time. Ten Minute Bills seldom pass. But they are a chance to fly a kite, put an idea on the map, run something up the flagpole, shoot a shot across the bows (see above) of some wicked and dangerous vessel or other, etc. etc., mix in further metaphors to taste. Were this particular kite actually to be nailed legally onto the map (which it will not be for the immediately foreseeable future) it would somewhat alter the legal relationship between banks and depositors. For more about this scheme, from Steve Baker MP (whom we have had cause to notice here before), see also this. Basically, this proposed law says that depositors should get to decide whether they still actually own what they already now think of as their own money when they hand it over to a bank, or whether their money degenerates into a mere excuse to create much more degenerate money, out of thin air. Depositors get to decide, in other words, about whether their bank deposits will be the basis of fractional reserve banking, or not. Or something. Don’t depend on me to describe this proposal accurately, or comment learnedly and in detail on its efficacy, were we to live in a parallel universe of a sort that would enable this law to pass right now. What I do know is that Austrian Economics (or, as I prefer to think of it: good economics), which is the theoretical foundation of the Cobden Centre, ought to have massively more sway in the world than it does now. Recently I have been trying to get my head further around Austrian Economics than my head has hitherto been, and I have also been watching the Cobden Centre as it has gone methodically about its self-imposed task of transforming Britain’s and the world’s financial arrangements, thereby massively improving the economic prospects of all human beings. I have always been impressed by Austrian Economics, ever since I first dipped into Human Action in the library of Essex University in the early 1970s. I knew rather little about Austrian Economics until lately and I still don’t know that much, beyond the fact of its superiority over bad economics. And I am now also very impressed by the Cobden Centre. What this latest parliamentary foray shows is that now Douglas Carswell MP seems to have joined the Cobden Centre network. Or maybe, what with Carswell having been an MP for some while, the Cobden Centre network has got behind Douglas Carswell MP. Whatever, and whatever his rank or title within Cobden Centre pecking order, Carswell is now a senior member of that network. Good. I hope and believe that there are many others now joining too, of comparable weight and intelligence. I could say more about all this, much more. And I very much hope that in the weeks, months and years to come, I will. In particular I hope to explain more about just why the Cobden Centre has so far impressed me so much. But the important thing now is to get something about this up here, now, so that the Cobden Centre crowd (Tim Evans in particular) will have one more little puff of opinion to point at, to help them suggest that the intellectual wind may at least be beginning to blow in their (and my) preferred general direction. September 13th, 2010 | 101 comments - (Comments are closed)
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit does not lose his temper, or at least not much. He favours a fairly dry, laconic style. So dry, in fact, that the duller sorts can miss it. So when he does come out with something unusually sharp, I tend to sit up and take particular notice.
By the way, does anyone bother to read Andrew Sullivan these days? Update: I see that Matt Welch, at Reason’s Hit & Run blog, has become unusually sharp about Sullivan these days. The latter’s blind devotion to TARP and the rest is driving even some people who are generally nice to Sully increasingly to distraction. September 13th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is part of a press release from the Institute of Economic Affairs, the London-based free market think tank. I could not agree more with what Mark Littlewood, IEA director general, says:
In a nutshell, much of the UK’s present economic plight can be understood in the light of how, since 1997, the public sector payroll – including all those “private sector” jobs dependent on public contracts, exploded. Pretty much most, if not all, of the big spending rises over which Gordon Brown presided were gobbled up by this enormous rise in public employment. Now of course, if you work in the public sector, you will believe, or at least want to believe, that your job is of great importance, and that those selfish Gradgrinds in Westminster and Whitehall deserve to be attacked. But the point needs to be made that the private sector, increasingly weighed down by taxes and regulations, cannot support this state of affairs; it is an absurdity, as some in the trades union movement claim, to somehow argue that cutting all these public sector jobs will somehow threaten Britain’s economic recovery. Any recovery that relies on an artificial support machine of massive public spending and employment is not a recovery worth having. And remember that what we should be aiming for is to be better off, not simply employed in pointless or destructive “jobs”. If cutting such public sector positions frees up capital for something likely to generate greater wealth overall, that’s great. The question arises, clearly, as to whether this government has the stones to say this over and over. The signs are not particularly encouraging. September 13th, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Can anyone offer any confirmation or contradiction of this observation, which is one of the comments on this posting about the rights and wrongs of smoking bans:
I am actually a bit surprised if that is true. One of the reasons why there has been so much talk of “passive smoking” is that it makes such perfect sense that if smoking is very bad for you, smoke near you day after day would also be somewhat bad for you. This suggests no badness for you at all. Can that really be right? This comment concerns the USA. I assume there is no particular arrangement there which actually forbids “passive smoking” being inquired into by insurance companies. LATER: As I should have included in the above, the author of that comment also has a blog. September 13th, 2010 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
I’m not quite sure what the moral of this report might be, but here is how it starts:
It’s an interesting way of looking at countries to ask: What statistics do they get wrong, and in which direction? (Also, which countries admit they got things wrong? Good for the government of Japan for noting their own error.) For instance, it is now a cliché of Russia-watching that life expectancy there has nosedived, especially among men. Rather than move on straight away to speculating about why that might be (alcohol being the usual suspect) I find myself wondering if at least part of that story might be that the incentives to report deaths, conceal deaths, invent deaths, and so on, have changed, while the death rates themselves have changed rather less. Is there now perhaps some government scheme in Russia to “support” those who have lost a breadwinner, with a cash lump sum, which causes many families to become, as it were, impatient? Did communism cause people to claim the dead to be still alive, like in Japan, and has that incentive now been switched off? I definitely recall reading about how, in India, before they allowed something more nearly resembling a free market, the tendency was for everyone to claim to be poorer than they really were, to avoid tax, which skewed poverty calculations dreadfully, and made the rest of us feel even sorrier for Indians than we should have. Publicly acknowledged suicide rates are definitely going to vary according to how much pressure doctors face to call suicide something that is less of a reproach to those who were caring for the deceased. A higher “suicide rate” could accordingly mean that, in that particular country, suicide is considered less of a scandal. We in Britain keep being told by our rulers that property crime has gone down, and we tell each other that we don’t think it worth reporting crimes any more. Hospital waiting lists, and all the perverse incentives associated with them, are another current British bone of contention. My preferred moral is that one of the good things about free societies is that they are somewhat less likely to perpetrate permanently bogus data sets, because falsehood is, eventually if not immediately, bad for business. Government, unchecked by power centres beyond government, is liable to emit such falsehoods for far longer. But it could just be that governments, by their nature, just love to gather statistics and to publish them, as proof that, one way or another, government is necessary. And more published statistics inevitably means more mistakes. September 12th, 2010 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
September 12th, 2010 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Christopher Booker in the Telegraph has another forced adoption story. Or rather he did on Monday, but now he doesn’t.
Do you think in your heart of hearts that there must be something more to it than that? Surely these social workers, while twits, cannot be as malicious as this story seems to imply? Have you ever thought, when reading about such a case, “well it sounds shocking, but one can never tell”? That is the point. One can never tell. One can never make an assessment of these stories because the ancient protections of open justice have been thrown away. Since the secret system of the Family Courts has denied the press and public the opportunity to assess the evidence in any other manner, one must make a guess as to the likelihood of social workers really behaving in this appalling way based on other cases where details have leaked out. Here are two accounts of similar cases, in which professionals – an independent social worker and a GP in one case, a judge in another, who were in a position to tell described the behaviour of social workers as “appalling injustice” and “disgraceful […] about the worst I have ever encountered in a career now spanning nearly 40 years.” Oh, and a sample of the sort of evidence that is held to be damning, as if the Cleveland scandal and the others like it had never happened:
September 11th, 2010 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Byron remarks in his Journals that Berne is “the district famous for cheese, liberty, property and no taxes.” He took liberty quite seriously. And also cheese. September 11th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been thoroughly enjoying reading this book about how the Allies sought – very cleverly – to throw the Nazis off the scent ahead of the invasion of Italy, hence saving potentially thousands of Allied soldiers’ lives. An extraordinary cast of characters is involved, conjuring up the sort of plot-lines that would do credit to any writer of spy fiction. And indeed several of the protagonists on the Allied side were novelists with vivid imaginations. A current controversy intrudes. Back in WW2, the Allies had the priceless knowledge via the code-breakers of Enigma about the enemy’s plans, and even more vitally, the fact of having cracked Enigma was kept a secret for many years under the various pieces of legislation controlling such matters both during the war and into the Cold War era. So when I read today about the latest moves by the Wikileaks website to publish all kinds of classified military information on the Web, I wonder about what would have happened if, say, a Wikileaks kind of outfit had been around during WW2 and had stumbled upon the kind of facts as described in the book I link to? Of course, if we had had the internet back in 1939 or earlier, and had the ability to spread information and views around outside the conventional channels of the MSM that existed back then, maybe this would also have been used to weaken or undermine the enemy side as well. (Would a Hitler have prospered in the Information Age?). I remember that in David Friedman’s recent interesting book (also available in an online form) about various trends, he addresses both sides of this question: what happens to privacy in an age of good encryption and ever-increasing attempts by states and other groups to put folk under surveillance. But even so, it should trouble anyone concerned with security to think that a Wikileaks outfit can put out this sort of material and seems to have no compunctions about doing so. And while Wikileaks may think it is performing a sort of public service, if we are in a war for national survival, say, and we use deception techniques to win, and some self-appointed characters decide to blow the lid on those techniques, then what should the response be? In my view, this is a treasonable act or at the very least an act of aiding and abetting enemy combatants. It goes beyond, I think, the sort of opposition and free speech, including the right to condemn what a government is doing, during wartime. (And by the way, even under anarchism, secrets might be of importance to certain people, so it is no answer to say that such issues are made redundant if we get rid of states). And it is not just about issues of national security that I think this website is running amok on. Take the world of banking. Some time ago, for instance, Wikileaks published data on individuals who have accounts at an Icelandic bank. Now no doubt the website will claim that it was acting in the public interest, but there are perfectly honest reasons for why people have private bank accounts, such as not giving out valuable information to oppressive governments/criminals (but I repeat myself, Ed) trying to grab that money, or kidnap them for ransom, etc. And perhaps the man who runs Wikileaks should be glad that some of the older punishments for treason no longer are used in this country. Very glad, in fact. September 10th, 2010 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment. But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father’s time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.” Those mid-term elections in November should be interesting. September 9th, 2010 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
I used to be a matron but as a patient I was treated worse than an animal. That was one of the headlines in yesterday’s Sun. I do mean headlines, too. Jean Emblen’s account was not top story but it was right up there among the footballers’ wives. The editor of the Sun thought the readers would go for a story criticising nurses. When did that happen? When I was a kid everyone was all soppy over nurses. It was considered quite shocking when a 1970s BBC soap opera called, tellingly, Angels depicted them as less than angelic. We can’t simply attribute this loss in esteem to the NHS. For round about the first half century of the existence of the National Health Service, nurses continued to be loved by all (it is only fair to say there are plenty of people, including those with recent experience of the NHS, for whom that has not changed; a huge amount depends on the individual hospital). So what has caused it? Does it reflect reality – are nurses really not as good as they used to be – or is it just fashion, a last ripple from the wave that knocked politicians over in the 1960s and teachers in the 1970s? One possible explanation is that nurses are no longer paid that badly. There is nothing like low pay for calling forth guilty affection. Once the pay improved people no longer felt they needed to make up the shortfall with love. However my impression is that the downward trend on the nurse popularity graph best tracks the increasing moves for the nursing profession to become more… professional. It’s all “nurse practitioners” and degrees these days, and being more like doctors. No one ever had any trouble hating doctors, once the thermometer went down. People think that nurses these days think themselves too grand to change a bedpan. Is this charge fair? Lucky me: I don’t know. You tell me. All I can say is that it would not surprise me if there was a tendency for both human contact and the dirty but necessary jobs to be de-emphasised in modern nursing, and maybe I can find a way to blame the NHS after all. It is what I would expect to see from an old command economy. Compared to most command economies, the NHS in its early years had a huge amount going for it: a sense of mission was in its collective blood. But as time as passed the blood has thinned, or done something else old and dry and sad that I lack the medical knowledge to build into my metaphor. (The blood of armies dries up in the same way, but then a war comes along and de-mummifies them. Or replaces them. ) An old and somewhat ossified organisation instinctively prefers its staff to have measurable, academic and relatively high status skills rather than unquantifiable, physical and and traditionally low-status ones. But no one was ever loved for academic skills. In the US, I learn, there has been a similar move from plain old nurses to nurse practitioners, but if the American equivalent of the Sun has started on the anti-nurse stories then I had not heard about it. This might be because US healthcare is, for the moment, not provided by the taxpayer. At least, a lot of it is, but not so visibly. My impression is that the extravagant love for nurses in the past and the extravagant annoyance with them now are both British phenomena. September 8th, 2010 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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